FAQ – Help with searches

This page is here to help people who do not find the Search page intuitive.

This one weird trick will astound you !

The one thing that’s not directly visible is that you can click on the orange “Search” button on top of every page WITHOUT TYPING ANY TEXT. When you do that, you land on the Search page in its “at rest” state. In this state it displays ALL entries, from newest to oldest.

Searches using incomplete words

This is, for instance, searching for “dare” to find results pertaining to Daredevil. Our old search engine allowed for that.

We no longer do that – of you type “dare” and hit enter, the engine will *only* search for the word “dare”, not words with “dare” in them.

This is because I haven’t finished the autocompletion thing yet. More about autocompletion when I’ve finished, heh.

Ordering results

This is the “Sort results by” zone that’s above the search results, but below the display of the number of results. You can tick one option to change the order in which results are listed. The options are :

Relevancy : The results start with the profiles with the strongest association with the words you’re looking for, and ends with those with the weakest association.

Most recent : The results start with the freshest profiles — those that have most recently been added or overhauled — and end with the oldest ones.

Most viewed : The results start with the results that many people have viewed, and end with those that few people have viewed (usually the newest profiles).

Alphabetical : The results are simply ordered from A to Z.

So for instance to display everything in alpha order click “Search” without entering any search text (since you want to see everything), then click on “Alphabetical order” in the “Sort” options. More about the alphabetical order later.

Filtering results

This works like on Ebay, Amazon and other sites with vast content. Filters allow you to only see results that match selected characteristics. They all are in the right-hand column.

Category

To explore the categories, you can click on the little “+” boxes to the left to expand or collapse the content of a category. Only one category can be selected.

Example

First I click on “Comics”, because Spider-Girl is a comic book character. All the profiles that DO NOT belong to the “Comics” category are no longer displayed.

Then I click, under “Comics”, on “Marvel Universe”. ”Marvel Universe” is now the active category. This means that everything that isn’t in the “Marvel Universe” category within the “Comics” category is NO LONGER displayed.

Then I click on the “MC2″ category. ”MC2” is now the active category. You can guess what happens.

Alternative example

I still like Spider-Girl (May Parker), but now I’m more familiar with how the search page works. So I click on the “+” next to “Comics” to expand it, I click on the “+” next to “Marvel Universe” to expand that, and I click on the “MC2” category that is now visible.

Presto, I can now see the profiles in the MC2 category and that was faster than clicking on each Category in turn.

Even more alternative example

I still like Spider-Girl (May Parker), but I don’t remember in which book she appeared. So I type “Spider-Girl” in the search box, and open her profile (keeping in mind that multiple characters were named “Spider Girl” – the one I want is May Parker).

Then I look at the categories listing at the top of her profile, and I see Comics -> Marvel Universe -> MC2.

*Now* I remember ! Still on Spider-Girl’s profile, I simply click on “MC2” in her categories listing, which takes me to the Search Page where “MC2” is the active category.

Role

If you want to narrow down your search results, you can tick one or more Roles in the listing. Only the articles that belong to that Role will be displayed.

Example

I am looking at Marvel Comics characters, using the Category filters explained above. But for my story, what I need is a bad guy.

So I click “Character (Villainous)” to only see profiles categorized as villains.

Out of caution, I also tick “Character (Possible antagonist…)” to also see characters that aren’t out-and-out villains but could still be useful in my story.

Power level

Very much like “Role”. Here’s a rough idea of what the levels mean:

Street-level is action heroes and super-heroes with no or few powers. Their opponents tend to be mobsters, the police, gangs, enemy soldiers, minor monsters such as zombies, etc. Daredevil, Sergeant Rock, action movie characters, heroic fantasy fighters, etc. usually belong to this tier.

Cosmic level characters are off the scale. Think Galactus, the Celestials or DC Comics’ Spectre during eras where he’s omnipotent and hitting people on the head with planets.

The DC Adventures/Mutants & Masterminds toggle

This is for M&M players who are specifically looking for game stats they can use. Hit the toggle to filter out profiles without M&M/DCA stats.

Filtering by tags

This function is not yet enabled. We have not started tagging our profiles yet.

A few notes about the alpha order

As noted above, the alpha order is obtained by running a search on everything (so, with nothing in the search text field), then ordering the results in alphabetical order. That’s straightforward enough, I say. Still, a few notes of interest:

We use quote marks for people indexed under something that isn’t their “real” name. Frex they are known by a nickname, or no name is ever given and we made something up. This puts them at the beginning of the alpha order.

Normally, we avoid using “The” at the beginning of names. For example the Thing is under “Thing”, not “The Thing”. For a few characters though we don’t have a choice. Their name really starts with “The”.

It is common for characters with a rank to have the rank listed in their name. This is true for both police and military ranks.